You can’t see the final result by looking at each ingredient separately.
What might life and baking a cake have in common?
Baking a cake requires many different ingredients: Flour, sugar, vanilla, baking soda, baking powder, salt, and butter/shortening. Some ingredients are sweet and some are bitter. Some ingredients we may even wonder why they are part of the recipe!
Every ingredient in the cake plays a role to deliver the end result – a baked cake worthy of sharing with your friends and family. If you were to separately taste each of the ingredients that go into creating a cake, you might never believe that the finished product would taste as good as it does. But once the ingredients are mixed together, in the proper quantities, something magical happens.
Life requires many different ingredients too: Family, friends, a job, where you live, your car, your hobbies, your faith, your mistakes, failures, successes, hopes and dreams. You get the idea.
Some of these ingredients are bitter. Some are sweet. Some are bittersweet. But they are all important to live a complete and well-rounded life.
If you have a life that is too sweet, you can become soft and lazy. If you get nothing sweet from your life now and then, you can become bitter and angry.
It helps to remember that when you are going through life, both the bitter periods and the sweet periods in just the right amounts, might be what you need to result in the most fulfilling and complete life.
And nothing could be sweeter.
Mark DeBellis, 2024